Justice Ministry official: Prisoners have blood on their hands.

US Secretary of State John Kerry’s plan to restart peace talks will include the
release of 82 terrorists – all of whom have blood on their hands and are serving
life sentences – it emerged during a meeting of the Knesset Interior and
Environment Committee on Monday.

The statement was made by attorney Ami
Palmor, head of the pardons department of the Justice Ministry.

This is
in keeping with rumors and reports in the Israeli press about the conditions of
the prisoner release – an expected precursor to the upcoming Israeli-Palestinian
negotiations Kerry announced last weekend.

The 82 prisoners in question
are all Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza who were sentenced for their
crimes before the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993.

Likud MK Miri
Regev called the meeting following reports about the push for a prisoner
release, of which she said, “Murderers must not be used as a tool in
negotiations.”

Col. Yuval Biton of the research branch of Prisons Service
presented figures to the committee reading that of the 5,120 security prisoners
in Israel, 3,533 have been convicted, 1,589 are imprisoned without bail, and 138
are being held under “administrative detention.”

Of those, 2,550 are from
Fatah, around 1,500 are from Hamas, and the rest are from Islamic Jihad and
other organizations, he added.

Biton said of the prisoners that 4,269 are
from the West Bank, with around 400 from the Gaza Strip, 200 from within the
Green Line, a similar amount from east Jerusalem and a few dozen from
abroad.

There are 550 prisoners serving life sentences, and of these, 349
are identified with Fatah, 114 with Hamas, 60 with Islamic Jihad, and 27 are
otherwise affiliated.

The security prisoners who were jailed for life
before the Oslo Accords and are not from inside the Green Line include a number
of men involved in some of the grisliest acts of terror in Israeli
history.

They include two terrorists involved in the Molotov cocktail
attack on a bus traveling from Beit She’an to Jerusalem in October 1988, killing
Rachel Weiss and three of her children, as well as IDF soldier David Delarosa
who died trying to save the family.

Other terrorists include two Gaza men
who stabbed to death David Dadi and his friend Chaim Weitzman after breaking
into Dadi’s apartment in Ramle. The two men cut off their victims ears as a
keepsake of the crime.